As we move closer to a paperless world, with almost all of our data stored and accessed electronically, it might seem strange to write about new print features in Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7—like I might as well write an article about why the Internet will be a big deal or whether slates will catch on. However, if you ask the person who sits next to the printer in your office whether we’re really printing less, he’ll probably tell you No (as he gasps for clean air in his ozone-swamped work area).
Considering the mobility of today’s workforce and the myriad of devices employees are using, it’s more important than ever that print options keep pace. In addition, users and organizations must enable the necessary features for a smooth and consistent print experience. Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 offer several features that enhance the overall print experience.
The User Experience
Several client features help make the end-user experience more smooth. Two of the most important improvements, both of which focus on mobile users and accessing desktops from many different locations, include remote printing and default printer selection, which I discuss in detail in the following sections.
Printing to a Windows 7 remote desktop. Printing from a remote session over RDP was always painful with traditional Terminal Services. On each terminal server, you needed to install all the print drivers that the connecting clients might use, so that users’ local printers could be redirected to the remote session and content could be rendered correctly on the terminal server and then sent to the client for printing on the print device. All too often, printer drivers were missing or the wrong version, which resulted in printing not working (at best—or at worse, a small Peruvian rainforest being destroyed as page after page of random characters printed).
Server 2008 addresses this problem with Terminal Services Easy Print. This new driverless printing model leverages the Microsoft XML Paper Specification (XPS) format, which works similarly to PDF files and contains both the data and formatting. With TS Easy Print, when a print operation occurs, rather than the terminal server rendering to a printer-specific format, a generic XPS document is generated. This document is then sent over the RDP connection to the client device, which lets the client device generate the printer-specific rendering using the locally installed driver from the received XPS file. If a user in the remote session looks at printer properties, the RDP connection captures this request and displays the user’s local printer properties, then sends any format options back to the remote session. Therefore, no functionality of the local printer driver formatting is lost even though no actual driver exists on the terminal server.
Although driverless printing was a huge improvement for Terminal Server–based sessions, Windows Vista didn’t include this functionality. With Microsoft’s introduction of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), and with remote sessions being increasingly used to connect to virtualized client OSs, having a driverless printing solution to connect to client OSs over RDP is a huge benefit. Windows 7 Enterprise and Windows 7 Ultimate support Remote Desktop Easy Print. (Terminal Services was renamed to Remote Desktop Services—RDS—in Server 2008 R2, hence the name Remote Desktop Easy Print rather than Terminal Services Easy Print.)
The Easy Print functionality no longer relies on the .NET Framework being installed on the client device. Instead, the XPS-to-GDI (printer format) conversion is now performed by the OS directly. With the Easy Print functionality, if you connect to a remote Windows 7 Enterprise or Ultimate OS instance and enable printer redirection, you’ll see the default printer and all the available printers. If you check the Model setting on the default printer, you’ll see that it’s using Remote Desktop Easy Print, as Figure 1 shows. If you select Printing Preferences from the context menu, you’ll see the advanced properties for your local OS. When the advanced properties of a printer are selected, the dialog box to show these properties is actually redirected to the client that has the full driver for the printer, because the advanced properties are driver-specific. A dialog box displays to advise you that the properties have been redirected, as Figure 2 shows. Because Easy Print is a feature of RDP 6.1, Windows Vista SP1 and Windows XP SP3 clients that have Remote Desktop Connection Client 6.1 or later and the .NET Framework installed can take advantage of Easy Print when connecting to a Windows 7 Enterprise or Ultimate OS over RDP.
Figure 1: Viewing printer preferences